More than two years after the city was forced to discontinue a recycling program, Moundsville has received funding to restart efforts in the new year. City Manager Rick Healy announced that the city had received a grant from the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection, enabling the city to begin collecting paper and cardboard waste at a drop-off site, to be established at the Sanitation Department. The grant was for $41,215.78 for a two-year period, which can be reapplied for in 2022.
Healy later said that the plan the city had devised was not entirely covered by the grant, with some extra amounts, estimated at around $5,000 to $10,000, would need to be covered locally. That money would contribute to, among other things, a new computer system, Healy said. Moundsville had previously maintained a mixed recycling service in years past, which had to be discontinued in 2018 due to misuse, Healy said. People were treating the recycling site — which at the time had been open any time for people to come drop off their recyclables — as a garbage dump, necessitating its closure. “It was halted in late 2018 because it just got to be a mess,” Healy said. “People were just dumping trash in the Dumpsters. This time, we’re going to start out slow. This program will be mixed paper and cardboard only.”
To enforce this use, the recycling program will be only open during certain times of day and monitored by an employee, whose wages will be covered through the grant. “It is going to be a monitored drop-off program, meaning we’ll select a certain day or days and time that we will have the gates open for them to bring this stuff, and there will be that employee there watching,” he said.